Rice Construction

Mr. Rice has another full-time job, so we expected to see him working on our floor on weekends and evenings. He began the job after 5:00pm on June 16, 2013 (Sunday) . By June 29 (a Saturday), he worked for 1 and 1/2 hours and left the job to help a friend with a water heater problem. He had installed approximately 422 square feet (34% of the total job) and only 1 of our 3 bedrooms. Because of my needing this work to be completed faster, I asked to pay him for work completed and told him that I was hiring a team of professional installers to complete the job (within 2-3 days). My frustration with Mr. Rice was that he would not stay on our job for an 8 hour day on the weekends. While he was good at small detail work, he was very pokey and inconsistent. Essentially, I was unhappy with Mr. Rice because of his lack of commitment to completing our floors in a timely manner, with respect to our family. This job required us to remove all our belongings from the house, so for the past 2 weeks, we've been living with our furniture and belongings in our garage and porches. He would show up and do a little work for a couple hours, then leave. At his rate of speed, he would have completed our wood flooring job in about 6 weeks. It was just an unacceptable pace. I am now unhappy with the price I had to pay to have Mr. Rice stop the work. For installing 422 square feet of wood flooring, Mr. Rice charged us $1850.00. (The going rate on wood installation is $2.50/square foot.) Do the math. He charged us $4.38 per square foot. He stated that he included the charges for any materials he purchased to prepare for the job. My husband and I had already removed the previous carpeting, tack strips, and staples from the floors, so we had completed all the prep work. We also had purchased the flooring and quarter round molding, as well. By the way, the flooring installers from Lumber Liquidators quoted $2.49 per square foot to install our flooring. For the entire job (1241 square feet), they would have charged us $3500 total. That price would have included removing the old carpets and prepping the floors. They would complete the job within 2 days. Lesson learned: hire real professionals who give you a written quote, a specific time frame, and a contract to warranty their work. Also, never hire your old friends to do work in your home. It makes for a bad situation and hard feelings.